Thread: Developer Guide table of contents
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dneary is offline dneary
2009-12-11 , 10:46
Posts: 263 | Thanked: 679 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Lyon, France
#8
Hi quim,

Originally Posted by qgil View Post
There is a first draft produced by the Documentation workshop at the Maemo Barcelona Long Weekend:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Developer_Guide_table_of_contents

(snip)

- There will be application developer SDK AND platform development SDK as separate tools. The current Scratchbox/complicated setting will be promoted for platform development only. Application developers will be directed to specific tools easy to install etc for Web Runtime and Qt native development.

So in practice the broad schema of the ToC could be:

Book 1: Maemo Application Development

(snip)

Book 2: The Maemo Platform
This is similar to the proposal from Barcelona in respect of having two distinct parts, one for the developer to get started, and another as a reference and guide for the platform;

What I'm missing from your proposed table of contents is getting a development environment up & running. For example, for the web toolkit, what are the prerequisites? What tools do I need? What software do I install? How can I test?

You're still going to need a VM/emulator/Xephyr to test applications, you're still going to need some kind of toolkit to build & package for the tablet and for your test environment (even if you're 100% web & cross-platform, like most Mozilla add-ons, you still need to document how to make an XPI file, test it locally, and distribute it - for a widget for a tablet you need some kind of environment to display & test it).

As you point out, for native/platform applications the set-up gets even more complicated. We still need to help people over the hump of installing everything and building their first application (even if it's only a sample application shipped as source code with the SDK).

Where in your ToC does that fit?

Cheers,
Dave.